Relevance of Health Warnings on Cigarette Packs: A Psycholinguistic Investigation

Abstract

Although most research on the effect of tobacco warnings has been focused on attitude changes following the presentation of tobacco warnings, this paper takes a somewhat new perspective by investigating cognitive processing of tobacco warnings by adolescents of different ages (i.e., 14-, 16-, and 18-year-olds). More specifically, this paper investigates the way adolescents encode different textual elements presented in tobacco warnings. By means of a standard psycholinguist paradigm (i.e., sentence evaluation paradigm), we evaluated tobacco warnings differing along three variables: (1) severity, (2) time consequence and (3) target (health vs. others). Our main result demonstrated noticeable differences between the age groups and between smoking experiences in the cognitive processing of tobacco warnings. Our experimental paradigm represents an important step in identifying the mechanisms through which certain types of written warnings are cognitively processed, which in turn may well set a critical base for understanding decision makers' responses to risky behaviors such as smoking and for constructing adequate health warnings.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study was supported by the Tobacco Prevention Office (part of the OFSP) and is part of a 2-year project on the creation of relevant warning messages. We are indebted to Marjorie Grivel and Philippe Handschin for helping us to collect the data. Great thanks to Cathy Moeschler, Pierre-Alain Diacon, Jaques Diacon, Karim Errard, Aldo Della Piazza, and all the other teachers and students that participated in this phase of the project.

Notes

¹ Hastings and MacFayden (2002) actually suggested that simply asking smokers how effective they thought advertisements were was not the most adequate mean to determine the effectiveness of a message.

²Among the variables that did not bear any significance in our data were family smoking history, peers smoking history, reasons to smoke, efforts to stop smoking, exposition to prevention (at home or at school), attitudes toward smoking (e.g., how easy is it to quit for a smoker?), and sport activity.

³Following Goodall and Appiah's (2008) findings, we initially built only loss-framed messages. We then decided to also include several gain-framed messages to ensure that participants in the experimental phase would not simply get used to the fact that all relevant messages are written in a loss-framed manner. An initial exploration of the experimental data revealed no different pattern in the gain-framed messages; hence, we decided to analyze all messages together.

⁴We are currently running the second step, which entails three testing phases: (a) a pretest phase, (b) a test phase, and (c) a posttest phase. In the first phase, different participants than the ones in this present experiment (but of the same ages) will be given, from among several questionnaires, an attitude toward smoking questionnaire, a need for cognition questionnaire, a social desirability questionnaire, and a motivation questionnaire (BIS/BAS scale from Carver & White, 1994). Each participant will receive, several months later, the same questionnaires preceded by the presentation of a health warning identified in this present experiment as being prevalent in readers' mental models. All changes in the questionnaire will be monitored directly after the presentation of the warning, and also 3 months later.